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Joseph-Mills-The-Absurdity-Of-America-George-S-Schuylers-Black-No-More.Pdf EnterText 1.1 JOSEPH MILLS The Absurdity of America: George S. Schuyler’s Black No More It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others....One ever feels his two-ness – an American, a Negro – two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled striving; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. – W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) What do we want?...We want to be Americans, full-fledged Americans, with all the rights of other American citizens. But is that all?...We who are dark can see America in a way that white Americans can not. And seeing our country thus, are we satisfied with its present goals and ideals? – W. E. B. DuBois, “Criteria of Negro Art” (1921) In 1931 George S. Schuyler published Black No More, a satire about Americans’ obsession with race. The book was controversial, in part, because Schuyler mocked African-American leaders. The novel contains parodies of Marcus Garvey, N.A.A.C.P. figures, and Tuskegee leaders. For example, Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard, a caricature of W.E. B. DuBois, writes ornate overblown editorials for The Dilemma, claims an “exotic” heritage, and “like most Negro leaders, he deified the black woman but abstained from employing aught save octoroons.”1 DuBois, himself, however, praised the book. He recognized that it would be “abundantly misunderstood,” because, “the writer of satire . is always misunderstood by the simple.”2 Although Black No More contained “scathing criticism of Negro leaders,” DuBois noted with admiration that the satire then “passes over and slaps the white Joseph Mills: Absurdity of America in Schuyler’s Black No More 127 EnterText 1.1 people just as hard and unflinchingly straight in the face.” In many ways, Black No More demonstrates satire’s democratic potential. Mockery becomes the great leveller, and by ridiculing all, the novel calls into question racial and class hierarchies. In a letter to H. L. Mencken, Schuyler stated his intentions: “What I have tried to do in this novel is to laugh the color question out of school by showing up its ridiculousness and absurdity...I have tried...to portray the spectacle as a combination madhouse, burlesque show and Coney Island.”3 Unfortunately, as DuBois anticipated, the novel has been misunderstood. In a 1971 introduction to the book, Charles Larson states, “It would be easy – and some people would perhaps say better – to ignore Schuyler's first novel,” and Margaret Perry’s comment that “we cannot dismiss [Black No More] entirely” reveals a desire to do just that.4 In fact, for decades Schuyler's work overall has been denigrated or overlooked. To give only one example, in Cary Wintz’s Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance, a table of “Year-by-Year Publication of Major Works of the Harlem Renaissance, 1922-1935” has almost fifty titles but does not include Schuyler's books.5 In the 1990s, however, Robert A. Hill and R. Kent Rasmussen recovered a significant amount of Schuyler's pulp fiction, and, in doing so, they demonstrated the need to re-evaluate Schuyler's work. In particular, Black No More, Schuyler's major literary achievement, needs to be reassessed. Considered by Arthur Davis to be “the best work of prose satire to come from the New Negro Movement,” and one of the few works of the time to use satire, the novel makes an important contribution to the discourse of race and national identity.6 The neglect of Schuyler's work may seem surprising considering both his productivity and the acclaim he received from his peers. The best known African- American journalist of his time, Schuyler's career spanned over fifty years. He wrote Joseph Mills: Absurdity of America in Schuyler’s Black No More 128 EnterText 1.1 thousands of articles, hundreds of short stories, dozens of essays, several serialized novellas, two novels, and memoir. At one point, Mencken called him “the best columnist, of any race, now in practice in the United States,” and Melvin B. Tolson believed Schuyler's essay “Our Greatest Gift” to be the “greatest satire on the race problem in this country that has ever been written.”7 However, Schuyler's reputation declined as he grew older and more conservative. A crucial member of A. Randolph’s socialist newspaper The Messenger, and briefly a member of the Socialist Party of America in the twenties, later in life, Schuyler became adamantly anti- communist. Eventually, he joined and wrote for the John Birch society. Long after Senator Joseph McCarthy had been discredited, Schuyler continued to call him a “great American.” He criticized those involved in the Civil Rights movement, insisting Martin Luther King Jr. was a type of “typhoid” spreading unrest and suggesting that Malcolm X was a traitor. In short, Schuyler ended up radically out-of- step with the mainstream African-American community. As a consequence, most critics avoid his work, refer to it only in passing, or misinterpret it. Schuyler's reputation has also suffered because he has been seen as the loser of a debate with Langston Hughes. The two authors articulated different positions about the importance of a racial aesthetic. In 1926, Schuyler published “The Negro-Art Hokum,” an essay containing an infamous claim that African-Americans are simply “lamp-blacked Anglo Saxons.”8 Although this statement was deliberately provocative, the main thesis of “The Negro-Art Hokum” argues that people are products of cultural conditioning. Their identities are determined by their education and environment. Since blacks and whites work the same jobs, wear the same clothes, use the same products, such as cars, cigarettes, books, and magazines, see the same films, and speak the same language, it is not surprising that they have the same Joseph Mills: Absurdity of America in Schuyler’s Black No More 129 EnterText 1.1 views and create similar “art.” Schuyler states, “In short, when [a Negro] responds to the same political, social, moral, and economic stimuli in precisely the same manner as his white neighbour, it is sheer nonsense to talk about ‘racial differences’ as between the American black man and the American white man.”9 Schuyler rejects ideas of essentialism as racist, and he sees the insistence on a distinctly black sensibility as no different from, indeed perhaps originating in, the racist beliefs of whites who insist on “fundamental, eternal, and inescapable differences” between the races. He concludes the essay saying, On this baseless premise, so flattering to the white mob, that the blackamoor is inferior and fundamentally different, is erected the postulate that he must needs be peculiar; and when he attempts to portray life through the medium of art, it must of necessity be a peculiar art. While such reasoning may seem conclusive to the majority of Americans, it must be rejected with a loud guffaw by intelligent people.10 A week later, in the same forum, Hughes published his seminal essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Arguing for a racial aesthetic, Hughes criticizes those artists who refuse to identify themselves as black. He maintains that someone who wants to be considered as simply a “poet” rather than a “black poet,” is revealing an “urge to whiteness.” His opening paragraph defines the “urge within the race toward whiteness” as a desire “to be as little Negro and as much American as possible;”11 thus Hughes equates “white” and “American.” Hughes’ position gained prominence, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, and his essay was adopted as a manifesto, by, among others, the Black Arts movement while Schuyler came to be regarded as an “assimilationist” and even an “Uncle Tom.” Attacks on Schuyler often utilize Hughes’ language. For example, Robert Bone accuses Schuyler of a “denial of racial ... identity,” a “revulsion toward the Negro masses,” and a “desire to behave like a white person – and a middle-class white person at that.”12 Joseph Mills: Absurdity of America in Schuyler’s Black No More 130 EnterText 1.1 Such attacks oversimplify Schuyler's thinking and misrepresent his position. One of the Harlem Renaissance's most complex characters, Schuyler cannot and should not be easily categorized. He repeatedly insisted that arguing against a “peculiar” Negro art or psychology was not the same as denying a black heritage. Throughout his career, he emphasized the need to know one's racial heritage, and he called for memorials to commemorate “the achievements, sacrifices and tribulations of Sojourner Truth, Denmark Vesey, Paul Laurence Dunbar...[and] Frederick Douglass.”13 He insisted, “I have always felt that a knowledge of the history and achievements of the Negro in America and elsewhere would do much to dispel [the] illusion of inferiority.”14 Schuyler published Fifty Years of Progress in Negro Journalism to illustrate African-American contributions to the profession, and he convinced J. A. Rogers to write a regular article on “great men and women in Negro history.”15 He also tried to organize a co-operative of black-owned businesses and develop a “publication exclusively devoted to belles lettres, to the encouragement and development of Negro writers and a medium for publishing their wares.”16 As George Hutchinson points out, many of Schuyler's contemporaries urged a respect for “racial” accomplishments and resisted the idea of a black cultural nationalism. For them, “Race pride did not conflict with a militant integrationism or even assimilationism; it seems to have been considered essential
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